Ran Zucker

I think people don't appreciate the "model" part of "language models" enough. Deep learning is cool, but everything we have now is downstream of work done in the 1980s by George Armitage Miller and Christiane Fellbaum - pyschology and linguistics professors, not computer science. All they were doing was just trying to model language - not generate it, not to run it on MIT exams, not to write code and build agents. Their team of absolute madlads manually (heh, like there was any other choice) cataloged the semantic relationships between 155,327 words - hypernyms, holonyms, troponyms, and (my fave) entailment. From here you can evaluate algorithms AND train them. Who would have known that these would the building blocks of AGI 40 years later? This work could only have come out of doing stuff for stuff's sake. This is why "basic science" needs to be funded — so that we plant trees under whose shade only our children's children will sit.